Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract more web traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to start attracting new traffic automatically whenever you post content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth looking into any and every opportunity you can to improve your performance and results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having a significant competitive advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything is running smoothly in the widget-making assembly line when things suddenly grinds to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives soon afterwards and, without saying a word, immediately goes to the main control box. After staring at the electronic components for about 5 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a very gentle tap about 3 cm from the right-hand side of the control unit.
Immediately, the whole workshop lights up and returns once again to normal.
The floor manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager calls the expert. Why had he charged them so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social networks and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that everything works to plan, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved. This is because it’s not just about installing a plugin, configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web server, your site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simple flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your web-hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your site can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites.
External Web Properties & Services – Configuration
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all of your content will get posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external sites to your traffic network, content linked back to your website will be automatically posted to these platforms. Your content and website will be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your settings to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with useful information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google Search Console are set up, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add tracking information to all of your web pages in WordPress using a simple plugin and send data automatically to many other online applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account is with Bing are set up, use this information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers users a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different solutions you can add to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
Configuring WordPress
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to ping all the update services you have listed in the Update Services field whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, go here: Changing Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do business online, you need to make sure that your website complies with all legal requirements.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog here:
Post Tags And Categories
Post tags & post categories help search engines index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish new content consistently to automatically begin attracting more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing strategies.
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